Upon its release in Italy, La Vacanza was largely overshadowed by Pasolini’s The Decameron and Bertolucci’s The Conformist , both released the same year. Critics at the time found it “too slow” for a Brass film and “too explicit” for an art film. Today, however, it has gained a cult reputation among Brass aficionados and students of European erotic cinema.
La vacanza was produced by Lion International Film and was, for all intents and purposes, a family affair. It was co-produced by Brass and Franco Nero, and the soundtrack music was composed by Fiorenzo Carpi, with a young Gigi Proietti providing vocals for the closing track.
: The narrative finishes with a chaotic outburst of systemic violence. While the factory women stage a strike, the ruling upper class and local police open fire, resulting in the tragic deaths of Osiride and a blind madam. Themes and Societal Critique Anti-Psychiatry and False Sanity
follows the story of a group of young friends who embark on a summer vacation to a coastal town in Italy. The film revolves around their carefree and hedonistic experiences, marked by nudity, sex, and experimentation. Through this seemingly lighthearted narrative, Brass critiques the societal norms and hypocrisy of 1970s Italy, tackling themes such as: The Vacation -La Vacanza- - Tinto Brass 1971 -S...
A highpoint of the film, where a group of prostitutes engages in a bizarre, "orgasmic" act of striking at their weaving machines.
The screenplay was written by Brass in collaboration with Vincenzo Maria Siniscalchi and Roberto Lerici. Lerici, a writer and linguistic researcher, contributed significantly to the film’s dialogue, drawing on the Veneto dialect and the earthy, rustic language of the playwright Ruzante. Most strikingly, the lyrics for the film’s songs were adapted from so-called “schizophrenic poems”—texts written by actual psychiatric patients that Siniscalchi discovered in a Neapolitan journal called Carte Segrete and within a mental institution itself. This direct incorporation of the voices of the mentally ill gives the film a documentary-like authenticity and a profound respect for its subject matter.
La Vacanza is a far cry from the stylized, explicit erotic cinema Brass became known for in the 1980s (like Caligula or Miranda ). Instead, this 1971 film is a product of the late 1960s/early 1970s experimental aesthetic. Upon its release in Italy, La Vacanza was
The film is anchored by powerful performances, particularly from its leads, who were known for their dramatic prowess.
The most critically respected element of the film is its unusual and haunting soundtrack. While Fiorenzo Carpi composed the score, the lyrics for several songs were written by real patients from a mental hospital. The resulting tracks, including "Se io non ci sarò" and "La voglia di scannarli tutti quanti", are performed by Gigi Proietti and Vanessa Redgrave. They offer a raw, unsettling, and deeply human glimpse into the minds of those society had locked away, making the music a powerful complement to the film's theme of institutional control.
The film uses the protagonist's "madness" as a lens to critique the hypocrisy of the ruling class, the church, and the traditional family unit. La vacanza was produced by Lion International Film
: While less frenetic than Brass’s earlier works, The Vacation still features experimental editing and surreal imagery. It has been described as a "surrealist fairy tale" with echoes of Luis Buñuel’s work.
The story follows (Vanessa Redgrave), a peasant woman who was committed to a mental asylum by her former lover, a Count, after he tired of her. She is granted a one-month "vacation"—an experimental leave—to see if she can reintegrate into society.
The production of La Vacanza was marked by a highly collaborative and improvised environment. Just a year prior, Brass, Redgrave, and Nero had wrapped the political drama Dropout (1970).
In the vast, often misunderstood filmography of Tinto Brass, the 1971 film holds a peculiar place. Sandwiched between his early forays into political satire ( Nerosubianco ) and his later, more famous forays into softcore erotica ( Caligula , The Key ), La Vacanza is a film of transitional tension. It captures the director in a moment of stylistic refinement, where his love for the human form begins to collide with a distinctly post-’68 sense of emotional disillusionment.